@doot okay some of my favourites...

• lemonbar: super simple X menu bar that literally just outputs whatever you pipe to it
• zutty: small X terminal
• teelim: (shameless self-plug) a self-truncating tee, useful for log files
• gitjournal: simple notes app for Android synced via git
• vlc: (almost) everyone knows this one but it's powered my local+remote media viewing for longer than a decade now and i'm still finding new features
• nano: my goto text editor for quick configuration changes. available almost everywhere
• jupp: my preferred longer-form CLI text editor. an improved fork of JOE
• redshift: adjusts your screen color temp. by time of day for given latitude:longitude
• mousepad: preferred simple GUI text editor
• xfce4: my preferred X desktop environment, nice and light on resources
• vscodium: de-microsoft'd version of vscode
• void: preferred linux distro
• histcat: (shameless self-plug) essentially cat for shell history files (they use various binary encodings)